Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Uber is an American
international transportation network company headquartered in San Francisco,
California. It develops, markets and operates the Uber mobile app, which allows
consumers to submit a trip request which is then routed to sharing economy
drivers. In India, Uber is in trouble –
in Dec 2014, a 27-year-old woman was allegedly raped by the driver of the cab
she had hired to return home from a dinner party in Gurgaon. The
incident took place when the woman, who works for a finance company in Gurgaon,
headed back to her home in north Delhi's
Inderlok area. She hired a cab run by a
private company to take her to Inderlok," police said citing the complaint
filed by the victim. On the way, the
woman dozed off on the back seat of the car only to wake up and find that they
had stopped at a secluded spot. She found that the car doors were locked and,
when she tried to raise an alarm, the driver thrashed her and then committed
rape, police said.

A massive search
operation involving 12 Delhi police teams was on in Mathura and other parts of
Uttar Pradesh to nab the accused. Delhi Police also announced a cash reward of
Rs one lakh for his arrest. The driver, Shiv Kumar Yadav, was finally was
arrested from Mathura in Uttar Pradesh by a joint team of Delhi and Uttar Pradesh
Police. The accused, Uber cab driver
Shiv Kumar Yadav, is 32-year-old and a
native of Mathura who was living in rented premises in Delhi. Yadav, who
allegedly raped the woman, is a repeat offender and was also involved in a rape
case in 2011 as well for which he spent 7 months in jail. The incident caused outrage in India.

Now, an Indian
court has left the ban on Uber Technologies Inc. in place in Delhi and asked
transport regulators to respond to the ride-hailing company’s challenge to an
order barring the service. The Indian arm of the San Francisco-based firm
sought to overturn the prohibition on Uber in the city after the court lifted
the ban on the company’s main rivals, ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.-owned Ola and
TaxiForSure last week. The Delhi High Court judge hearing Uber’s petition on
Wednesday said the company was still subject to the ban and the next hearing on
the matter would take place July 8.

Miles away, in what could prove to be a precedent-setting
ruling for the sharing economy, California’s Labour Commission has ruled that
an Uber driver should be classified as an employee, not an independent
contractor. NYTimes
reports that the ruling, made in March
but which came to light after Uber filed an appeal on Tuesday evening, ordered
the company to reimburse Barbara Ann Berwick, a former Uber driver, $4,152.20
in expenses and other costs for the period when Ms. Berwick worked as a driver.

Uber has
long positioned itself as a “logistics company,” an app that drivers and
passengers use merely to facilitate private transactions and not a
transportation fleet with tens of thousands of employee drivers. The company
argued it did not exert any control over the hours its drivers worked and did
not require drivers to complete a minimum number of trips, according to the
court filing.

But the
Labor Commission cited many instances in which it said Uber acted more like an
employer. The ruling noted that Uber provided drivers with phones and had a
policy of deactivating its app if drivers were inactive for 180 days. ”Defendants
hold themselves out as nothing more than a neutral technological platform,
designed simply to enable drivers and passengers to transact the business of
transportation,” the ruling states. “The reality, however, is that defendants
are involved in every aspect of the operation.”

Representatives
for Uber and the California Labour Commission did not immediately respond to
phone and email requests for comment.